Little Girl, Big Voice

What the audience at Seattle's Colony Club saw in the spotlight was a little (4 ft. 11 in.) button-nosed Nisei girl in toreador pants and white coat, with a pony tail that hung below her shoulders. What they heard when she began to sing was a booming, brassy voice that all but rattled the ice in the highballs. After the rousing chorus of Anything Goes, she slipped into a slow and smoky Fine and Dandy with a voice which she seemed to have husked up from somewhere in the floor. She was clean and limber on the ballads, bouncy and loud in the jump numbers. "You expect a high, tinkling voice," said a reflective late drinker, "and she opens up and comes out at you."

West Coast audiences and critics who have been listening to 22-year-old Pat Suzuki for the last two years like to argue whether she has the style of Billie Holiday, Jeri Southern, Judy Garland or Ethel Merman. The truth is that she sounds occasional echoes of all of them. But she also has a dead-sure sense of phrasing all her own and a warm-tinted, open voice which casts its own mellow glow over the familiar lyrics she handles.

Everything Pat knows of professional singing she learned from listening to records on a battered portable phonograph. The California-born daughter of a Japanese farmer (almonds, grapes and peaches), she passed the war years in a detention camp in Colorado, graduated from California's San Jose State College and lit out for New York and (she hoped) Europe before settling for a teaching career. In Manhattan her money dribbled away. To pay the rent Pat was willing to try anything, landed a walk-on spot in the road company of Teahouse of the August Moon. Cast members heard her after-hours warbling, urged her to go professional. She memorized The Rodgers and Hart Song Book, was signed by the Colony at first hearing.

In quick succession, Pat has made her U.S. and Canadian TV debuts, signed her first record contract (with Vik). "One thing I don't want to do in music," she says, "is to go in for the oh-how-sad-I-am-I've-lost-the-only-man-I've-ever-had, and I'm-covered-with-moss school of thing." She knows just how she wants to sound: "It's like nudes in art; you can have them Manet's way, in their purest form, or you can have them Petty style." Pat is hot after that big Manet style.

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